by Gregory Day
†
After six years, the stabilisation methods used from Bluff Road at Barwon Heads and along Thirteenth Beach seemed themselves to have justified what some of Gibbon’s cohort in the CRB liked to call his ‘junket to Froggyland’. No longer was there sand spilling out over the tarmac that ran along the ballowed hills and hummocks. The marram grass and the palisades had steepened and contoured the hummocks to such an extent that a farmer called Abrahams, whose property backed onto the golf club from the nor’west, had begun to complain about the blocking of sightlines from his farmhouse. Never mind the improvement of his pastures, now he was concerned about his ocean view. At first FB was tempted to use Abrahams’ protest as a catalyst for the counterargument he was considering putting to Gibbon. ‘Perhaps,’ he could say, ‘we should consider ameliorating the situation somewhat.’ But no, in the end he decided, good Catholic boy that he was, that that would be in bad faith. And after all, the stats told the story. His ‘Incidence of Sand Drifts on Road’ graph clearly showed how he had achieved Gibbon’s ends. The lessening of the frequency and size of the black ink bars denoting sand drift on the graph is marked from 1969 onwards. All that sand, spilt from the shaker, was now retained amongst FB’s slats and rhizomes – and no amount of aesthetic complaints would ever convince old Gibbon that that wasn’t a damn fine thing.
So instead FB settled on the only course available to him. He took the philosophical course of the utmost sincerity, and it is that course, along with his romantic heart, that I felt rolling in so powerfully beneath the prose of his slim little book.
21
South of Brémontier
Alwyn Gibbon was getting on in age, there was no doubt about that. But with that ageing came his ‘vast experience of managing the transport needs of the state’. And never before, in all his long years in the office in McKillop Street, had he heard anything like it.
A magnificent life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away. It is waiting like the cake is waiting when there’s butter, milk, flour and sugar. This is the realm of freedom. It is an empty realm. Here man’s magnificent power over nature has left him alone with himself, powerless. It is the boredom of youth without a future.
Henri Lefebvre
FB had waited until a mood of confidence was upon him. He needed the full force of his ego to withstand the scorn he knew his superior would pour upon his idea. In his head, in his bedroom, with his mother snoring loudly on the other side of the wall, he had rehearsed it countless times. ‘This is no longer the Enlightenment,’ he would say. ‘Such Grand Projects are now seen for what they are: violent impositions on our natural inheritance by a wilfully ignorant human society.’
But no, he wouldn’t get far with language like that. Nor would he succeed by citing the example of les landes, how no land in the 1970s could be viewed as it was back in Brémontier’s time: as a nothing space, terra nullius, a wasteland. ‘Do you ever wonder how the shepherds would have felt? When they drained les landes. When they transformed their homes, their sheep pastures, their way of life.’ Even the words of the esteemed Professor Lacombe of the University of Paris would have no effect, for, at the bottom of things, Gibbon and his friends despised academics.
So he decided to keep the ‘fancy stuff’ out of it. He would simply suggest that, on closer examination of the particulars of the local scene, and from what he had observed of the circumstances in France, he had come to think that marram grass – Ammophila arenaria Ammophila arenaria etc. – was in fact the solution of another epoch and that in the Australian twentieth century it should logically be viewed as too invasive a species to justify its undoubted capacity to stabilise the dune landscape.
He knew that Gibbon would scoff at this, too; that FB would be written off as a Whitlam man, virtually a communist in a department which had always benefited from a more traditional, not to say conservative, approach. But there was nothing FB could do about that, no way he could paint the picture of what he had seen in France, what he had painted on the walls of Paris with his own hand, nor how he had finally understood the potential violence of excessive infrastructure when he saw the cobblestones of the Latin Quarter asphalted over.
It was a Friday morning in June 1974 when he eventually knocked on the door of Gibbon’s office. The road signs of the entire country were about to be switched from imperial to metric and FB was hoping that Gibbon would be distracted by the details of that move, the deadline for which was looming at the end of the month. He had the names of the array of native plants that would replace the marram grass at hand. He had the recommendations of two government botanists and also the transcript of Baron von Mueller’s original advice to the pioneer settlers of Port Fairy, which of course they had rejected in favour of the quicker and easier solution the baron had subsequently furnished them with. He didn’t expect Gibbon to be swayed by such evidence, but he had it anyway. In his head, as well as in his briefcase. The rejection of the native solution by Port Fairy was a turning point for the colony and this would be another one. He had a flow chart demonstrating how the phasing out of Ammophila arenaria could be achieved without a detrimental effect on the sand drift on the road. It was only a question of time. It would be a decade-long project. He had the support of local volunteer groups who would assist with the labour. And then there were the Croatian women, whose reliability was proven.
As he began to speak, in the hard-backed chair opposite Gibbon’s desk, his heart began to sink. It was a bright winter’s day, the sea glare everywhere in the streets. Strong Corio light poured through the window behind Gibbon’s head along with the sound of the locally made cars driving below.
Immediately FB could hear how outlandish the idea sounded, how impractical, how contrary. It could not be engineered. He had begun with full guns blazing but was soon running out of ammunition. He attempted to outline the debate for Gibbon’s benefit, but all his superior wanted to know was: ‘What has this got to do with the roads?’
‘Well, the roads are borne by the landscape, Alwyn. The right management of the landscape is critical to the perpetuity of the roads.’
‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Gibbon interrupted, ‘but this is not a question of erosion is it?’
‘Well, yes, it is, on the seaward side.’
Gibbon sniggered. ‘Yes, well, when was the last time we had to manage a road on the seaward side of sand dunes? They call that the beach. Are you out of your mind, Frank?’
Perhaps for a moment, behind the insouciant and precocious exterior he was in the habit of adopting with Gibbon, his confidence crumbled. He wanted to unpick the seam, to pull out all the grass he had stitched into the sand. He wanted to cut down the entire forest of les landes, to see the stilt-walkers squelching again across the marshes, to allow Cap Ferret to shift about in the currents. In just the flicker of an eye he digested the belatedness, and therefore the impossibility, of the task. And he knew that Gibbon had noticed that flicker of doubt. From there he wasn’t sure where on earth he could run.
He composed himself. He lived in a provincial town, made of butter, milk, flour and sugar, at the ends of the earth. Of course such a vision would seem impossible.
‘Is this not the exact opposite approach to that you have been recommending ever since you returned from F-F-France?’ Gibbon spat the word out like an expletive.
‘No, these views are canvassed in my report on my findings in France. If you’d read it, you’d know that.’
Gibbon’s face flushed, then went pale, like a bushfire had passed over it. He shook his head slowly from side to side and glared at FB. ‘Your report’s bloody well written in French!’ he shouted.
The regional manager’s shout took a long time to subside in the room. For a few moments the two men sat listening to its slow decay.
‘Well, anyway,’ FB said eventually, with a dismissive wave of his hand, ‘I demand the right to evolve.’
22
>
Granulation
It took Alwyn Gibbon several months – eight, in fact – to relieve Frank Herschell of his duties with sand. By March 1975 FB was writing to Professor Lacombe in Paris about his fears of his dismissal. ‘To be removed from the dunes would be a significant intellectual loss to me,’ he wrote. ‘Especially given that the revolution I now know you were always alluding to during my time in France has finally occurred in my thinking.’
Whether or not FB actually believed that Gibbon would have the conviction to follow through with the threat is unclear, but by the beginning of April he was left in no doubt. Whatever Gibbon’s other qualities, he was certainly determined and, as they say, once he had made his mind up about something there was no stopping him.
As it turned out, his most powerful weapon in his transferring of FB’s duties was the controversial report written in French. Knowing full well that FB was, due to his international experience, viewed as a golden child at the CRB head office, Gibbon decided he should be hoist on his own petard. FB’s original report seems sadly now to have been lost, but sitting in the CRB state archives in Melbourne, which are now housed under the VicRoads umbrella, is the complete English translation of the report which Gibbon commissioned from a French translator, a Mrs Frida Appleby, in August of 1974.
It is because of that report, which extols the enterprise and virtue of the planting of Ammophila arenaria along the French Atlantic coast, that he was able to convince his head office in Melbourne that the efficacy of Frank Herschell’s work on sand dune stabilisation had run its course. For how, as Gibbon argued, could a CRB employee be sent at great expense to Paris, France, in order to learn from historically proven methods so as to employ those methods successfully in the local field, only to recommend the diametrically opposite approach only a few years after his return? Was he suffering from amnesia, or a rebellious form of parochialism? Could he not read his own French?
Of course, quite apart from the fact that the trip to France was not at the CRB’s expense but achieved largely through a scholarship FB had himself proactively attained, his report is indeed very convincing. But FB’s borrowing of Camus’ line demanding the ‘right to evolve’ in that crucial meeting with Gibbon in June 1974 is at the heart of the issue. The seeds of his own revolutionary thinking are, as he said to Gibbon in that meeting, to be found in the report, if one reads it closely. Not once but twice he refers to emerging evidence pointing to the critical significance of maintaining marshlands in a littoral environment – which casts the draining and foresting of the enormous area of les landes in a questionable light. And with respect to marram grass – or gourbet, as it is referred to in the report – he does speculate about some of the problems that might arise due to its extremely hardy qualities of proliferation.
But it has to be said that these are only seeds of what he later came to think. For the most part, FB’s report contained everything that Gibbon must have been looking for, even going so far as to suggest the possible planting of pine forests to convert Australian marshlands into productive forestry environments. This kind of talk was so far removed from what FB was now proposing – the exploration of the potential of a mixture of palisades and a more diverse native planting in order to stabilise the sand without destroying the historical features of the landscape and habitat – that Gibbon’s suggestion that Frank Herschell was in need of new challenges within the department seemed plausible enough.
What was at stake here, though, was the plausibility of FB’s deep philosophical shift. And in the years ahead he came to realise how unsuccessful he had been in communicating that change of position. But how, I wonder, could he have communicated it, how could he really, being the man he was? Was he to tell his former champions in the Melbourne head office about the birdcage door Mathilde had opened in the tabac at Clamart? Was he to regale them with the conversations he heard over a disconnected black telephone sitting on a tree stump in Saint-Sulpice? Was he to describe what it felt like to step outside a river of people flowing through the streets of their city chanting ‘Sartre, au musée! Sartre, au musée!’? Or should he describe to them the confusion, the painful mystification he felt when he realised that there existed in the world a beautiful young woman for whom love could be best expressed through an ideal of social justice? And how he had been abandoned to that, left alone in an old circular mill in a remnant patch of the saltmarsh he was now mourning the loss of?
For years it nagged at him: this failure to communicate. The way the disciplines of the heart and mind, the public and the private, divide us. He realised how hamstrung he was by his own endemic reticence, propagated as it probably was by being cuffed off a stool as a child for imagining a whole world in the ingredients of a cake bowl. With a mediocre adversary like Gibbon he was full of pluck, but in the general run of life it all remained underneath. As it did for the most part in the pages of his book.
But still, I noticed something.
†
He was assigned freeway ramps, kerbing and channelling, roundabouts, and grew especially fond of bridges. Ironically, his financial situation was improved by him being transferred off the dunes and was even further improved when his mother passed away. Intriguingly, he gives this only a cursory mention in his diary, writing with a complete lack of sentiment about clearing out his parents’ belongings and staying on in the house, to which he made no alterations.
Gradually, without his mother’s rule, the house, rather than just his single bedroom, began to fill up with books. In late 1976, with his extra funds, he imported the 1962 metallic blue Renault Ondine from France. It was exactly the same model as that in which Pierre Green had driven Lacombe and he around Cap Ferret.
I have not yet discovered the paperwork covering the importing of the Ondine amongst his papers but I keep finding the indent order forms and invoices for books and marvel at the extent of his interests. Right through the years after his exile from the dunes he continued to order widely: everything from books of Portuguese poetry from City Lights in San Francisco, to monographs on Japanese aqueducts from Kelly & Walsh in Hong Kong. He bought the latest American fiction from Strand Bookstore in New York, and European psychoanalytic theory and Estonian liturgical music from Charing Cross in London. He made extensive notes about the Frankfurt School, but also about Telford and Brunel, and Scottish Enlightenment painters. Yet all the overseas orders, the reading and the taking of notes are of course no inoculation against perceptions of sadness. On the contrary. A single man shut away with his intellectual obsessions in a quiet house on a quiet street in a small regional city would constitute, for some, the very definition of sadness. Rather than deal with a world which doesn’t always agree with him, he retreats to a world he can control. And there he dabbles and scribbles, brushes toast crumbs off his lap, composing half-finished essays, copying passages from books, making shorthand notes of ideas he will never realise. He is like Sterne’s Uncle Toby but without the eccentric affection of family around him. He is like an aged version of Flaubert’s Bouvard or Pécuchet, a dilettante of received ideas. He reads Montaigne, but he is not Montaigne, not as lucid or honest, or as self-reflective. He is sexless. He could be a bodhisattva but he tends more to the solipsistic, and often falls asleep in the very minute after one of his brightest ideas has occurred. He avoids any full-blooded engagement with life, and fails to execute his responses; and so, yes, his situation is sad, pathetic even.
But this is not FB. It is not the man I met in the bookshop, the man I lunched with, nor the author I have read. My feeling upon meeting him was that he was a man who had fully digested the absurdity of human endeavours, in the sense that we as humans so repeatedly get things wrong, and particularly in the sense of our habitual violence towards each other. For FB to read a writer like Montaigne was not to luxuriate in noble ideas but to dig even deeper into that strata of absurdity. The capacity of wise men to articulate each thought, each perfectly put sentence of balance and tr
uth, only made the behaviour of our species seem even crazier. And so the pendulum swung. The abstract versus the real. He saw it in geology, in morphology, he saw it in politics, he saw it all around him in the architecture of Geelong. A beautifully sited town, on gentle slopes falling to the curving shores of the bay, with its view of the You Yangs across the water a picturesque equivalent to Posillipo. And what had been done with such a situation? The beauty had been almost entirely obscured by rough and makeshift colonial deals and careless modern alignments.
So rather than contributing to the tragic human seesaw of beauty and wilfulness, he preferred, in the end, to say little. To live his quiet life and to stay put, even in far-from-ideal professional circumstances. For how, in a world caught inside this tragic oscillation, could he achieve anything anywhere? Surely he would only add to its absurd momentum?
This, I believe, was FB’s attitude in the years just before he wrote The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties. It was a cast of mind triggered in him by the combination of what had happened with Mathilde and by Gibbon removing him from his work on the dunes. His quiet, therefore, was a predisposition, a sanctuary and, to some extent, a wisdom. He was not, after all, as Mathilde had judged rightly, a crusader. As a result of all he’d seen and felt in France, he’d arrived at a logic suited to his local scene, which had in turn given birth to a vision, and that vision, like his passion for Mathilde, was rejected. But he did not lose the vision. It would just have to wait, until the same winds of time that scattered the sand up and down the coast had removed whatever it was that stopped his vision from being clear and obvious to others.
